Let's Play Doctor: Role Playing Games

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We go on an epic quest to save the RPG.

By David Clayman, Michael Thomsen

We may not be doctors, but, thanks to the power of the internet, we can pretend from time to time. In this continuing series of articles we'll focus on a particular topic in gaming that could stand to hear a little doctor's advice. Sometimes the subjects will obviously be on life support, while other times our focus will be on more pre-emptive medicine. Prevention is the best cure, after all.

Once upon a time, the Role Playing Game represented the absolute height of the gaming industry. Upon its release in 1997, Final Fantasy VII was a shocking reminder of how much nascent power the medium had, both in terms of touching people's emotions and providing an expansive fantasy world in which gamers could let their need for escapism run wild. Going back further, you can follow the evolution of the entire medium in parallel with the growth of the RPG, from the earliest MUD games for PC to the overwhelmingly detailed worlds of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Mass Effect (not to mention all the Dragon Quests, Final Fantasies, Ultima's, and Phantasy Star's that came in between).

While there are still a number of ambitious and inventive developers, taking bold new risks with the genre, the traditional titans of RPG development in Japan have begun to show signs of stagnation. Where there was once narrative ambition and complicated worlds of intrigue and moral gray zones, a disappointing sense of familiarity and mechanical angst has taken root. Like other genres that have been consumed by the increased set of expectations created by past success, it's become increasingly difficult for some of the biggest names in RPG development to take risks.

This should be all the more troubling to companies like Square Enix and Namco Bandai as Western developers like Blizzard, BioWare, and Bethesda have gradually been able to wrestle away their creative crown. Yet, even these hungry Western developers have struggled to overcome many of the most limiting conventions of old RPG's and have failed to break out of their hardcore niche and appeal to a wider audience (excluding World of Warcraft, of course). We've got five handy suggestions that could help invigorate the genre. Keep reading to see what we've got to say and don't forget to leave your own thoughts in the comments below!

Kill The Cutscene Cutscenes have quickly gone from being the belle of the ball to the ugly step child in the videogame world. In the late 90's watching lengthy cutscenes filled with angst and exposition was one of the surest ways to catch the attention of a gamer. A decade later, many gamers have come to see static cutscenes as obstacles that actually get in the way of enjoying a game. More and more games allow players to actually skip cutscenes, while other games like Half-Life 2 eschew the cutscene entirely, unfolding their narratives from a constant first person view.

Most major RPG's, however, remain addicted to lengthy expository cutscenes to tell their story. Even the most celebrated modern RPG's, like Final Fantasy XII, Lost Odyssey, Eternal Sonata, and Persona 3 (to name only a few) all lean heavily on static non-interactivity to unspool their stories in a stodgy and didactic fashion. The winds of change are blowing in from the West, however, as developers like BioWare and Bethesda openly pursue more integrated narrative experiences. Mass Effect famously made dry exposition playable through a painstakingly intricate system of branching dialogue, while Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion allowed players to define their own story arc with a wealth of side quests and guild building that made the main story seem almost pointless.

It's time for RPG's to ditch the old crutch of using cutscenes to tell their story. Cutscenes have come to prevent players from investing themselves in stories by telling. As traditional RPG's like Lost Odyssey's and FFXII's sales flag while non-traditional RPG's like World of Warcraft and Mass Effect steal their thunder, the message should be clear to developers. It's no longer possible to wow players with sheer technology. People play games to participate whole-heartedly in an experience and every second that they're not directly participating is a wasted opportunity. From dialogue trees to embedded narrative in the gameplay environment (ala Portal) there are already a number of proven techniques to tell stories in a fashion unique to videogames. It's time to commit to expanding on these ideas in RPG's. Everything else will just be a waste of the player's time.

No More Numbers One of the most absurd things in BioWare's otherwise brilliant Mass Effect, is the meter that quantifies the player's behavior in terms of "Paragon" or "Renegade." As players make choices throughout the game, they earn points that apply to either category which, consequently, determines whether the player will ultimately be "good" or "evil." In a game built around immersion, credible interactions with other characters, and moral complexity, it's a painful reminder of the crude mathematics that run through even the most ambitious RPG's. It's also a sad commentary on the evolution of the genre when the only way developers can think to express a complex mechanism is with a numeric scale.

It's time for RPG's to drop the numeric approach to leveling up and boosting stats. No one wants to experience an epic story in an imaginary world through the lens of a spreadsheet. This might have made sense in the early days of D&D tabletop games when the need of a common and quantifiable rule set served as a springboard for people to imagine those upgrades for themselves. Now that games have largely removed the importance of player imagination from the genre, the burden is now on developers to erase those mechanical seams of character progression. When I get a new power in a game, I want to see a new animation and new reaction from enemies. There's nothing more anticlimactic than getting "+2" to one of your abilities and then having no visual feedback that anything has changed.

Peter Molyneux seems to be aware of the importance of representing character evolution in a visually dynamic way, promising to show characters age with experience and bulk up with the increased number of battles in Fable 2. While the underlying calculations used for battle (or any other area where character stats are used) might still be rooted in numbers, there's no need to clutter the player's attention with minute changes. The use of elementals, changes in character models, and upgrades to weapon models should all be used as primary methods of communicating character upgrades. Don't tell me my "charm" index has increased from 12 to 15. Tell me that I've got an extra option to choose from in the dialogue trees and unlock an extra set of facial animations for my character. Don't tell me that my resistance has increased by a few degrees, show my character with a glowing talisman that casts an ever expanding and protective halo around my character. The time has passed when players should spend minutes before battle poring over charts. If you can't represent a change to a character graphically, don't include it in the game.